Ost und West

Sidney M. Goldin is invited back to Galicia for the wedding of his niece, to see family for the first time in thirty years, and to bring along his daughter, Molly Picon. Molly is a tomboy who enjoys boxing -- participating, not watching, and she wows them in the shtetl with her breezy American attitude and flapper dancing. Poor rabbinical student Jacob Kalich is enamored, but he's too shy to do anything about it. When the celebration gets wild, his friends call for a mock marriage...and they perform it so well they are actually wed. Kalich refuses to give his bride a divorce, despite the orders of the rabbi. Instead, he says, if she still want a divorce after five years, he will give her one. Then he disappears.

If the first two years are all about Miss Picon, the best-known star of the Yiddish theater outside of Edward G. Robinson, the final third is about her real-life husband, Kalich. It's a far more standard plot, but the jokes are less on the title cards and more in what people do. Like most of her screen roles, Miss Picon's enormous stage presence makes itself visible erratically. Fortunately the jokes are good, and Goldin was not only one of the players, he was one of the best directors of Yiddish movies in the 1920s.

Miss Picon was on the stage by the age of six, and by the time she was 20, she was one of the best known stars of Second Avenue. Her occasional movies through the 1930s were all produced in Europe; as she aged, she turned to playing the fiercely protective Jewish mother. I had the pleasure of seeing her in the 1960s on the stage, and despite the slighting comment of my grandfather's second wife -- "She's no Ida Kaminska"; that's what professional jealousy will do to you -- you owned everyone in the theater when she took the stae. When Kalich died in 1975, she cut back on her professional engagements, except for the occasional Cannonball Run movie. She died in 1992, aged 94.